Prevention of Brain Aneurysms

• Contributing Health Issues
• Recommended Actions
• Lifestyle Changes

Contributing Health Issues

At this point, the only preventative measures are screening, controlling high blood pressure and eliminating smoking. Both high blood pressure and smoking are doubly dangerous, as they contribute to a wide range of diseases, not just aneurysms. High blood pressure can affect the heart, kidneys, eyes and circulatory (blood) system.

For women, use of oral contraceptives and pregnancy can cause high blood pressure, However, 9 out of 10 of the 50 million Americans who suffer from it have no identifiable cause for their hypertension. There is no way of determining if you have high blood pressure other having your blood pressure checked by a medical professional. These are the factors that increase your susceptibility to high blood pressure:

Factors you can’t control:

• Medical family history of hypertension
• Race (African-Americans have a greater risk)
• Aging
• Diabetics

Factors you can control:

• Alcohol
• A diet high in sodium (salt) or saturated fat
• Tobacco
• Oral contraceptives
• Obesity
• Physically inactive lifestyle

A secondary type of hypertension can be caused by:

• Renal (kidney) disease
• Pheochromocytoma
• Cushing’s syndrome
• Dysfunction of the thyroid or pituitary
• Pregnancy

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Recommended Actions

The following are recommended actions based on the "Medcohealth" website:

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Lifestyle Changes

There are ways of keeping your blood pressure under control:

• Maintain a healthy weight
• Reduce salt in your diet (keep sodium intake at 2,400 mg daily). Salt causes your body to retain water, putting more fluid into your blood stream & increasing the pressure of the blood flow.
• Exercise
• Don’t Smoke. Besides the temporary blood pressure boost nicotine gives you, smoking contributes to atherosclerosis, which builds up plaque on your blood vessel walls, making the vessel opening smaller. If the same amount of blood is pumping through a smaller tube, the pressure goes up.
• Increase fiber and decrease fat in your diet. Eat fruits, vegetables, grains and low-fat dairy foods
• Avoid excess alcohol
• Try a relaxation technique. Meditation, even for 10 minutes a day, has been proven to decrease blood pressure.
• Talk to your health care provider about medications you currently take. Some, such as these, might affect an aneurysm condition.
  • Diuretics – Can flush some of the water out of your body.
  • Beta-blockers - By blocking an enzyme called resin, they slow down your heart rate.
  • Calcium channel blockers - By keeping calcium out of the heart muscles and blood vessels, they relax blood vessels lowering the pressure.
  • ACE inhibitors - Particularly useful for diabetics with hypertension, these reduce the release of an enzyme that constricts the blood vessel and increases pressure.
  • Combined alpha/beta blockers - This combines the action of alpha-blockers which relax the blood vessels with beta-blockers which slow the heart.

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